Alex Rosenberg

On his book The Atheist's Guide to Reality

Cover Interview of November 06, 2011

In a nutshell

Most people think of atheism as one big negative. But there is much more to atheism than knockdown arguments that there is no God.

There is the whole rest of the worldview that comes along with atheism. It’s a demanding, rigorous, breathtaking grip on reality, one that has been vindicated beyond reasonable doubt. It’s called science.

The scientific worldview requires atheism. It can’t be an accident that 95 percent of the members of the US National Academy of Science (along with their foreign associate members) don’t believe in God.

But science also enables atheists to answer all of life’s universal and relentless questions. Some of the answers it provides are disconcerting. Several are surprising. But they are all as certain as the science on which our atheism is grounded.

So why aren’t scientists more up-front about these answers that we can read right off of science? Mainly because the answers are bad PR for science in a nation of churchgoers.

The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009

[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011